In the familiar automatic packing lines, and especially those intended for food products such as molded chocolate tablets or slabs of candy coated with chocolate, the said products, when they come from a production machine, customarily a molder or an enrober, are intended to feed a series of packing machines. Those products are transported by endless conveyor belts from the production machine to the packing machines. Picking up, one after another, some of the products transported by the endless belts is accomplished by automatic feeder stations, each one of which directs the products it picks up toward the packer with which it is associated. The machine's production capacity is generally equal to or slightly less than the sum of the capacities of the packing machines of the same line. Therefore, when an automatic feeder station or the packing machine associated with it gets out of order, some of the manufactured products cannot be taken charge of by the remaining packers, and consequently they must be evacuated at the end of the line. When they are molded products, they can be recovered in baskets and recycled to be molded again. On the other hand, when they are coated products, it can easily be imagined that it will scarcely be possible to mold them again, so that the surplus products will then constitute an irrecoverable loss, or possibly a raw material for making secondary products.
In order to mitigate these disadvantages, lines such as those defined above have been developed which consist of a means of storing rows of chocolate slabs temporarily, disposed on trays which then are stacked one on top of the other, for reintroduction into the line manually when all the elements going to make up that line have resumed their normal operating rhythm. Such a storage device is described in Swiss Patent No. 426,638, for example.
This device, although it makes it possible to reduce the amount of waste in the manufacturing of coated products, nevertheless has some major disadvantages. The fact is that storage requires trays which then are stacked one on top of the other. Because of the weight of the trays and the products, such stacking may cause crushing of, or at least partial damage to, the stored products. On the other hand, recycling the stored products makes manual handling necessary.